Colossal Youth: Slumland Empire

“It is wrong to liken a director to an author. He is more like an architect, if he is creative. An architect conceives his plans from given premises—the purpose of the building, its size, the terrain. If he is clever, he can do something creative within these limitations.”—John Ford

If cinema resembles architecture more than any of the other arts, then Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth makes for an intriguing case study. Shot over two years with a non-professional cast in the Cape Verde immigrant slum of Fontainhas just outside Lisbon, Costa’s film is a poetic if perplexing work that turns a run-down neighborhood into a psychic landscape of light and shadow reflecting the liminal lives of its inhabitants.

Both beautifully raw and willfully abstruse, the film invites any number of approaches to understanding it. Those in the know may refer to the two previous installments of Costa’s trilogy on life in Fontainhas, Bones (1997) and Vanda’s Room (2000). Some may compare Costa’s compositional gifts with those of his Portugese predecessors Manoel de Oliveira or João César Monteiro, or cite his association with Jean-Marie Straub and the late Danièle Huillet, who share his penchant for recitative dialogues and a meticulously formalist approach to realism. Or one might find themselves echoing Mark Peranson’s ebullient praise in his write up for Cinema-scope: “This is so out of the zeitgeist I don’t know where to begin.”

I beg to differ, mass walk-outs at Cannes be damned. As challenging as this film is, at first glance it falls into much of the same stylistic territory as a dominant strain of festival cinema that relies heavily on static long takes and a non-demonstrative approach to performance. It’s a style that I am finding increasingly exhausted and exhausting, which may be why I at times resisted Colossal Youth, suspecting it of defaulting to an international cinematic house style for universal ennui. When I find myself at such an impasse, Ford’s analogy of the filmmaker-as-architect feels particularly apt because it brings the mind back to focusing on the specific, unique relationship the creative mind wishes to have with the life in this location.

Nearly every scene of Colossal Youth’s 155 minutes features Ventura, the name of both the character and the man playing him. He’s a 60-ish Cape Verdean whose wife leaves him in the opening scene, which is presented in Costa’s characteristically elliptical manner: a wide shot of furniture being tossed out of a third story apartment followed by an infuriated monologue delivered by Ventura’s as-yet-unidentified wife, a knife gleaming in her hand. Ventura spends the remainder of the film shuttling from one outpost of the impoverished neighborhood to the next, visiting a revolving series of younger inhabitants. None of his relationships to these people, or their relationships to each other, are clarified: some refer to him as Papa, most notably a younger, lighter-skinned woman named Vanda (Vanda Duarte), who offers him a bed to lie upon as she delivers lengthy monologues in front of a television that never seems to shut off.

Holed up nights with a young man in a shack, Ventura takes over the talking duties, helping his companion memorize a long, eloquent love letter to give to his estranged wife. But in some of these scenes, Ventura wears a head bandage and a different shirt than the stained white dress shirt he has in every other scene. It is unclear how much of the film is in flashback and even if one were to parse out past and present tense using visual or informational cues, it is all shot in the same impassive tone of the here and now. The film’s sense of time taking place out of time may be one way that it reflects the mindset of its protagonist, a recovering drunk who admits to a lifetime of sleeping in strange homes after all-night binges. In that sense, any of the younger people he meets could very well be his children, but the film undermines such literal readings.

Similarly, it is never clear how much these characters’ experiences are based on the actual experiences of the actors. By jamming together fiction and non-fiction elements and discarding familiar markers (i.e. father, daughter) to describe characters, the film achieves a bracing if confounding immediacy, as the audience must constantly assess and re-assess relationships based on each nuance of their interactions. The characters don’t seem to share this much anxiety, but that may be because they are used to a lifetime of comings and goings. In one scene, Ventura visits Vanda just as she is about to go to work—leaving her five year old daughter unattended—and she gratefully lets him in as an impromptu babysitter (cut to a shot of him snoozing while the daughter gives the most horrifying lost child gaze since Jean-Pierre Léaud).

While the film’s temporality can be challenging to the point of confounding, it is Costa’s treatment of space that more immediately impresses, if only as an object lesson in Ford’s maxim of being creative with one’s limitations. The film is shot in some of the most depressingly barren interiors to be found outside of post-Soviet cinema, not only in the burned out slum houses, but in the new government-subsidized apartment that Ventura is scoping out, presumably to reunite all of his “children”. The blinding, unadorned white walls of the new building are as oppressive as the dim, stained domiciles found elsewhere. Vanda’s unfurbished housing project residence is as much a prison as a home; a gaudily ornate mini-chandelier dangling from her dining room ceiling looks like the welfare service interior designer’s idea of a bad joke.

One of Costa’s prime achievements is in giving these locations and their inhabitants a profound dignity by virtue of his lensing. At times he does this perversely by hiding them in shadow, giving his subjects the chiaroscuro treatment as they offer rambling ruminations from their literal inner depths. Costa’s economy of production achieves a brilliant consistency as virtually every scene is lit from a single source (in some scenes it’s the reflection of light on a single object, most memorably a flower). His use of DV is another testament to the existential properties of present-day digital imaging: the hard lines that surround figures in video set them defiantly against their oppressive backgrounds. The sense of these peoples’ hereness is so hyper-real at times as to become surreal; they aren’t so much characters as they are visual artifacts of a place and time. And here is where the film’s endless sense of time pays off: as incidents and interactions accumulate, these unassuming characters amass in weight, to the point that late in the film, in a scene where Ventura and Vanda sit quietly in a room, their hunched bodies seem to emanate so much unspoken pain into the sterile space surrounding them.

As much as I’ve tried to make a case for the logic behind the film’s more puzzling elements, after one viewing I am not fully persuaded that Colossal Youth’s many fragments cohere into a masterful whole. According to Peranson, Costa spent two years shooting 320 hours of footage, and no doubt he established strong relationships with his actor-subjects in that time, but that still does not discern whether the film’s seemingly loose structure is a vivid reflection of the dissolute lives playing out on screen, or is simply dissolute, indulgent filmmaking. Yet I have no reservations in lauding the film for the specific and innovative approaches it takes toward depicting a way of life that is usually portrayed, when it is portrayed at all, without attentiveness or empathy. It is in the attempt to create a house of cinema from the derelict moments of these people on screen that I find Colossal Youth pulsing with purpose.

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Very glad to see this film covered here; I saw it last weekend and was impressed by it, but also exhausted at times. I did find myself at times wishing I had a better knowledge of the history of both Portugal and Cape Verde--I wasn't sure if the later scenes of Ventura in the shack, when they talk about some sort of unrest happening around them, were a reference to a historical event or something more ambiguous.

I also went into this film not having seen Costa's two earlier films, making this my first introduction to these characters; at some point, I'd be interested in seeing how perceptions of the interpersonal relationships here shift with or without knowledge of the previous films.Posted by Tobias on 2007-02-23 16:48:00

Thanks everyone -

Nathaniel - for someone who hasn't seen COLOSSAL YOUTH yet you give a great description of its finer points.

Ed--thanks and by all means see it if you have the screener. PS your review of Bamako broke my heart. :-(. I'll be reviewing it here in a few days, most definitely in a more enthusiastic light than your review though I'm not sure yet by how much.

Bill--I don't know about you but my mind seems to have filtered out some of the negative reactions I was having to the film and the stronger points are now pretty firmly lodged. In fact the act of writing the review became a way to come to terms with the film and make it work for me (hopefully not in a way that constitutes "creative writing").

Also, as I touched on in my own blog, I can't help wanting to compare this film favorably to INLAND EMPIRE (which may be why I referenced it in the title of my review) but I didn't want the review to be an Armond White-ish good-movie-vs.-bad-movie piece. Still, there are many points of comparison between the two films â€” use of DV, fragmented, dream-like narrative, a creeping sense of drift and despair overtaking the charactersâ€¦ but Costa's film wins out in terms of establishing this mood within a real-life condition involving real-life characters. The mix of documentary realism with the surrealist elements results in a rich cross-pollination where the Lynch film feels merely cross-bred, an endless series of references to his own staid pool of ideas. I'll just put this out there as more food for thought...Posted by alsolikelife on 2007-02-22 17:22:00

Consider me confounded. I was never bored, and loved the posings of Ventura against the bright white backgrounds, but not having seen any of Costa's previous work I wasn't sure of what he was up to most of the time.Posted by Bill W on 2007-02-22 14:53:00

Great write-up Kevin. I have a screener of the film I haven't been able to get to but your take on it now makes it a top priority.Posted by ed gonzalez on 2007-02-22 14:32:00

Thanks for the excellent write up. I've been dying for this or Vanda's Room to hit video somewhere, anywhere. I was very impressed by the Costa I have seen (Ossos, Casa de Lava, his doc on the Straubs) and was intrigued by the idea that he was moving away from the strict Bressonian influence so readily apparent in Ossos. James Quandt did a great piece on this movie in ArtForum, I think, last year in which he suggested that this was the direction Costa had been moving since Vanda's (which Quandt apparently considers his best). My own impression is that Costa does not so much re-invent the wheel as refine its mechanics, paying special attention to elements overlooked by less circumspect craftsmen. His work is unique in the sense that he is definitely not reveling in romantic ideas of the underclass--the mise en scene is far too concentrated and lived in. There is a genuine sense that Costa is not affecting an attitude toward his subject; his aesthetic persuades as a justifiable complement to the depths of vulnerability and intimacy he manages to find. In this way his work is revelatory and bracing and far from dismissable, easy humanist claptrap.Posted by nathaniel on 2007-02-22 07:48:00